Chicago’s oldest camera store 5/30/20 (Andy Pierce photo)

I was at the historic Central Camera Co., store, 230 S. Wabash on Friday afternoon.

I waited outside the door to pick up some prints at Chicago’s oldest camera store. My friend and long time clerk Timothy Shaver came out. We did an elbow bump and I gave him condolences towards the recent passing of his mother at age 99. Third generation store owner Don Flesch arrived next. He offered me a piece of candy as he does with most of his customers. He pulled his face mask down a bit to reveal a smile that would never be denied.

We began talking about the pandemic and all the things Central Camera has survived since his grandfather Albert Flesch opened the company in 1899. World Wars. The Holocaust. The Great Depression. Digital photography.

And a little more than 24 hours later Central Camera was torched in the downtown riots.

The store was looted and set on fire Saturday night.

Flesch said the fire, smoke, and water damage was 100 percent. “They got through the (burglar) gates with a crowbar,” he said during a Sunday afternoon pause from cleaning up his store. “Then they were able to break the doors and the windows. They stole everything out of both windows. People were running in and out. And I’m across the street watching it. I couldn’t do anything. There were thousands of people wandering the streets, screaming, breaking, robbing, defacing the buildings. There were not enough policemen.”

On Saturday night Don told Charlie DeMar of Channel 2 News that he would rebuild. And then he showed how he saved the first camera his grandfather sold in 1899.

It was the rugged No. 1 Folding Pocket Kodak, which sat in the front window.

Don Flesch on a different day. (Liz Strause photo.)

Don is 72  years old. He was not filled with hate. He did not point fingers. He expressed empathy towards George Floyd, the black man who was murdered Monday evening by a white Minneapolis cop. Don calmly sat across the street from his smoky camera store and spoke of hope and a better future.

A GoFundMe page has been established for Central Camera and the goal is $250,000.

I sat alone in my living room on Saturday. I’ve assembled several photo books with prints developed by Central Camera. They’ve helped me with my Polaroid cameras. Tears came to my eyes. I will recall this night without a photograph.

Flesch said the fire started in the basement. The 4,000-square foot basement was trashed. An upstairs safe was pried open and money was stolen.  “I saved all the old phone books,” Flesch said. “We have phone books that go back to 1920, all the supplier’s names. I got those out. My grandfather had a brass 10-inch horizontal by 2-inch vertical stand that said Central Camera Company. I was able to save that.

“I saved another sign of Grandpa’s in the window that said “Photographs Live Forever.”

Don’s grandfather Albert Flesch hired an African-American clerk in 1902. Flesch told me this story on Friday. I asked him to repeat it on Sunday. “His name was George,” Flesch said. “He was about 6’6″ and his hands were eight, nine inches long. In 1963 he came to say hi to my Dad at this (South Wabash) store. Dad waved him in and said, ‘Come on in, you’re family.’ He shook my hand and it got lost. He was so kind and sweet. I still see him in my mind.”

Don’s memories of hanging around his beloved store date back to when he was six years old. He would shoot rubber bands between the showcases, never aimed at anyone. Back then Central Camera stayed open late two nights a week. “You had to,” he told me in 2004. “Back then there were more questions and more answers. That is the great part of life. Do you know why Eastman Kodak uses yellow? It’s the most identifiable color in the distances.”

Vintage photography (Courtesy of Central Camera)

Central Camera has been in its current location since 1929. Albert the Founder (as Flesch called him because his birth name was also Albert) was a Jewish immigrant from Hungary. His father was a poultry farmer who sent his 13-year-old son to America. He traveled alone. Flesch once told me, “At wartime, a boy was forced into the Army for 25 years and a Jew was put on the front lines to act as a human shield. So his father thought that life would be better in another part of the world.”

That became Chicago.

Albert the Founder arrived in Chicago and stayed with a cousin who lived on Van Buren Street–eight blocks west of the current store. He found work at the Siegel-Copper department store downtown. After a few years, he was moved to the camera department. “It was 1896, 1897,” Flesch said. “He was 18 or 19.” Albert the Founder settled in Humboldt Park. He opened Central Camera in 1899 at 31 E. Adams, around the corner from the current location. From 1907 to 1929 the store was on the Wabash Avenue side of the Palmer House hotel. When the first Palmer House was razed in 1929, Central Camera moved to where it stands today.

Over the years Central Camera attracted clients such as Sammy Davis, Jr. who used to stay at the Palmer House. Cary Grant didn’t like crowds so he would make an appointment to visit Central Camera before it opened. Most of my former photography colleagues at the Chicago  Sun-Times were Central Camera customers. Empathetic photographer and nanny Vivian Maier had her film processed at Central Camera and was coming to the store up until a few years before she passed away in 2009.

Flesch would give candy and homemade cookies to most anyone who walked into his store; black, white, brown, young and old. The late photojournalist Dorrell Creightney opened the first black-owned commercial photography studio in Chicago in 1969. He was Central Camera regular.

My late father wandered over to the store regularly during his lunch break. Don remembered my Dad. I am not a photographer, but I think of my Dad when I go to Central Camera. Maybe that’s why I go to Central Camera more than I need to. This is when brick and mortar becomes more than a place.

The exterior White Way steel and neon Central Camera Co. was installed in 1930. The light forest green sign is one of the most photographed pieces of neon in Chicago. “People love photographs,” Flesch said. “They love history and images. That’s what cameras do.  We sell love instruments. Now, we can’t make love to you, but we can show you how to keep that love moment.”

Flesch never knew his grandfather. He died from a heart attack in 1933. He was 56 years old.

Don Flesch, a proud small business owner.

A hand-colored portrait of Albert Flesch hangs in the mezzanine office. When he wasn’t behind the downstairs counter, Don worked  the same desk that belonged to his father Harold.

A forest of old press cameras, tripods and cloth-covered cameras have grown over the years in the middle of the office. The centerpiece of the collection was a 4 x 5 all metal Busch-Pressman camera with the big flash, just like New York news photographer Weegee used in the 1940s and 50s.

Flesch said the rare cameras have been damaged by smoke and water.

After Albert the Founder died, Harold and uncle Stanley created a colorful catalog to help make ends meet during the Depression. Harold and Stanley jazzed up the catalog with extra attractions such as horoscopes. A 1939-40 edition suggested that  Geminis were “born photographers” but warned them to “beware of double exposures.”

Flesch said, “My uncle borrowed some money and designed a model airplane that had a hundred different parts. You bought it as a kit.  He sold that business after a year for $25,000. With that, they opened a business called Albert’s Specialty Company (ASC). They made the first metal tripod. From 1939 on they worked with Magnavox to make parts for aerial bombs. The bombs didn’t hurt people, but they illuminated areas so photographs could be taken.” Chicago lore suggests that gangsters bought the small ASC tripods to use as machine gun rests.  Stanley Flesch died in 1993 at the age of 86. Harold died in 1983.

Vivian Maier took this photo of a Central Camera customer (Courtesy of Central Camera).

Gizmos and gadgets are in the Flesch DNA. Flesch generally has a dozen colored pens crammed in his shirt pocket.

He once stopped in the middle of a conversation to count the pens because he had confused a pocket magnet with a pen. Flesch is a paternal twin. His brother Ron is an architect in New York City. His sister Caren is a retired art teacher from Whitney Young High School. The family grew up in South Shore and Hyde Park.

In 2020 Charles Ian Ezaki was celebrating his 25th year as a Central Camera employee. A graduate of Lake View High School, he began working in the store at the age of 15. His father John worked at Central Camera.

His story underscores the immigrant’s soul of Central Camera. Charles’ great-grandparents were from Fukuoka, Japan. His great-grandfather Thomas was on a survey crew that developed the Republic of Formosa, now Taiwan.

In March 1942 his great-grandparents and grandparents were dispatched to an internment camp at the Gila River in Arizona. Before settling in the camp they were forced to live in horse stalls at the Tulare County Fairgrounds in Arizona.  In 1943 they were allowed to leave the camp and resettle in Chicago.

Charles was gutted on Sunday afternoon. “It is what it is,” he said. “It did not burn to the ground. The last photos I saw of the sign, it was still lit up. There’s another protest today and hopefully,  it will be peaceful. There’s still a lot of anger out there.”

But he was touched that the Central Camera GoFundMe effort had raised $25,000 in three hours on Sunday. “I’m amazed at that,” he said. “I did not expect that much from people.”

On Sunday Flesch reflected, “Years ago I started talking to myself. ‘What’s the sense of having the past control the present?’  I can’t change it. I want to move on. I want to have my store again. I want to have people have fun there. Everyone enjoys it. I was so happy that people didn’t get hurt, but I was so angry that certain people took the force away from this poor man dying in Minnesota and used it as an excuse to do what they did.”

Just before the COVID-19 shutdown in March a friend of Central Camera’s took a photo of Charles Ian Ezaki entering the store. He had not cut his hair in 14 months. He was growing out his hair to donate to the Wigs for Kids charity. The walls of Central Camera are framed with snapshots of such generosity.

Charles Ian Ezaki at Central Camera, March 2020

“I love taking pictures,” Flesch said in a 2004 conversation while merrily wandering around his store. “And I’m a lousy photographer. Do you know where the hump is in the middle of the car? I keep a little camera there.

“I’ll be driving 50 miles an hour. I come here at five in the morning from my home in Skokie and the sun is coming up. You can’t pull over, but you want to get the picture anyway.”

The sun will always come up.  Everyone knows that. Not everyone has the faith to look beyond the clouds. That is why Don Flesch’s spirit is a guiding light for the times we are living in.

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